


Of Science and Progress

by Asidian



Series: A Very Long Game [5]
Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Adventure, Beards, F/M, Fire, Gen, Gunpowder, Mustaches, Poor Life Choices, Pyromania, Romance, Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-27 10:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6280540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asidian/pseuds/Asidian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Will be summer soon," said Wolfgang. "You will not be wanting beard."</p><p>"Ah," said Wilson, and left off prodding at his newest gadget for long enough to take the razor. "I suppose not."</p><p>So Willow watched with interest as he scraped away the black mess from his chin – watched as a narrow, sophisticated face appeared. Perhaps there was something about the way the fire light caught the angles of it, all warm glow and shadow, but Willow thought that it was a very good face indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You don't need to have read the other fics in the series to get what's going on in this one. In terms of timeline, for those of you who are following along, this runs more or less concurrent with Out of Darkness.
> 
> Speaking of timelines, Willow's twenty-two in this, Wilson's thirty-two (both in keeping with the age estimates Klei gave for them), and Wolfgang's forty-one.

The door was a thing from a carpenter's worst nightmare, cobbled together with scraps of wood, rough-hewn gears, and a sandbag. It looked like a strong wind would take it down – and Willow planned to subject it to much more than that.

She peered out between the leaves of the berry bush, watchful and impatient. The structure hadn't been here the first time they'd explored this meadow; she was sure of it. It hadn't been here two days ago, either, when she'd passed through collecting carrots.

So wherever it led, it was newly created.  And it wouldn't have _been_ created if the man who brought them here didn't mean to use it soon.

"Is still quiet," said Wolfgang, crouched beside her. He was decidedly less camouflaged than Willow herself, given his bulk and the vibrant red and white stripes of his leotard. Willow didn't think it would matter. She didn't plan on there being enough reaction time _for_ it to matter.

"Shh," she said, absently. Her thumb was on the switch of her lighter, tracing it, unaware of the motion. It would be any minute now.

"Has been two days," said Wolfgang. "Food is almost gone."

Willow pressed down a little, experimentally, imagining how the flame would look when it bloomed to life. "He'll be here soon. I can feel it."

"Perhaps we break." There was a rustle of leaves from beside her as the strong man shifted, and a big hand settled on her shoulder. "Two, three hours. We hunt; we cook meat. Then we return."

Willow didn't answer. She didn't have to, because the door standing in the clearing had begun to glow, a brilliant white light that spilled out across the grass. It was almost blinding, but she stared straight into it like it held the answers to the universe.

When the door cracked open, the light grew impossibly more dazzling – so bright that tears streamed from her eyes. The whole world flooded white, as though lightning had struck everywhere at once.

And there, standing in the doorway, was the figure of a man. He was nothing more than a vague, dark smudge in the painful radiance, but it was what she'd been waiting for.

Willow didn't hesitate.

She rushed forward, one arm up to block the glare. The other hand was on her lighter, and she flicked it to life with a tiny spot of yellow flame. Wolfgang's footfalls were reassuring in her ears, keeping pace beside her, but she could not spare the time to glance his way – not when there were more important things to attend.

She found the gunpowder by touch, grainy through her fingers against the supple grass surrounding it. Willow lowered the flame to its edge, heard the sound of it catching more than saw the spark. She looped her hand through Wolfgang's bulky arm. "Go," she said.

They went.

She counted it down in her mind: three, two, one, and then the world was filled with the shattering _whump_ of the explosion.

The light from the doorway went out all at once.

Through the blotchy afterimages, Willow saw the door fragment and split, pieces of debris torn from its lintel. She saw the man knocked from his feet, thrown like a ragdoll through the air, and she gave a wild cry of triumph.

 _Do it now_ , she told herself, _don't let him get up_ – and she sprang forward, snatching up the axe she'd set aside for just this purpose. They had him where they wanted him, finally. They had him where they wanted him, and he couldn't run away through his stupid, broken door.

She was going to wipe that smug grin off his stupid, smug face, and when Wolfgang was done pounding him to a pulp, she would burn his stupid dapper suit in a bonfire, every last piece of it.

Willow reached the man without slowing – catapulted onto him, to pin him where he'd fallen, a knee on either side of his torso, and to hell with impropriety. He lay face down, groaning and bloodied, and her vision was still spotty with the after glare, but already her mind was whispering that something was wrong.

She ignored it, and she seized his shoulder to flip him over.

"All right, you jerk," she started – but the words petered out before she could complete the sentence.

It wasn't the man who'd brought them here at all.

She would have seen it earlier, if she hadn't been half-blinded. Had seen it, maybe, and hadn't wanted to believe. This man was shorter and slimmer, with a haggard face and a few days' growth of beard. He also, beyond any doubt, had the most ridiculous hair Willow had ever seen.

"Is wrong man," said Wolfgang, sounding as poleaxed as she felt.

"You're not him," said Willow, tone accusing, eyes narrowed.

But the man didn't seem to be paying attention to either of them. He didn't seem to mind the fact that he was lying on the ground bleeding, or that the explosion might have killed him, or even that Willow was still straddling him.

He was laughing as though he was quite mad – shaky laughter, but filled with genuine delight.

"It worked," he said, and lifted both hands, torn and bleeding, to cup Willow's face. "My God, and there are _people_."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everyone who's sticking with me. Hope you enjoy! o/

The man's name was Wilson.

Once she'd gotten off him and he'd pressed a cloth to his bleeding head and they were walking him back to their camp, Willow rather thought her first assessment had been accurate.

He was mad.

"No, you don't understand," Wilson was saying. One hand kept the cloth clamped firmly to his forehead to staunch the blood; the other gesticulated wildly as he spoke. "The likelihood of there being additional worlds, when we already know there are two – three, now – is remarkably high."

Willow regarded him levelly, considering. "How high?"

The man waved his free hand at the sky. "I don't know. Remarkably. And add that to the man who brought us here, who stays only for a moment and then disappears like, like a –"

"Particularly vile snake going into its hole?" Willow suggested.

"—ha, yes, thank you, like a snake. And this snake, why, he must be going somewhere, mustn't he?" The free hand spread its fingers. "Clever little snake, cobbling together all sorts of cursed doors."

Wolfgang, brow furrowed as though he had trouble keeping up with everything Wilson was saying, pointed out, "Snakes no have hands."

"A metaphorical snake, you understand," said Wilson. "And, er. Well, I suppose he hornswoggled me into making the first door for him. But that's just the point! He's not the only one who can put them together. If we make another, we can walk between the worlds, and we'll have to get the right one eventually."

Willow began to smile. "The one where we'll find our snake curled up in his hole."

"This snake is Maxwell," said Wolfgang. "Da?"

"Oh, yes," said Willow.

Wolfgang thought this over. "Snakes are crushed with boot to back of head," he said, so casual as to be off-handed.

And Wilson looked around, up to the strong man. His head swiveled back to Willow, and his grin was very white in the scruffy black growth of his beard. "I suppose I'd best start another door, then," he said.

Mad or not, Willow thought she liked Wilson very much indeed.

===

"Will be risky," said Wolfgang, peering through the reeds in the swamp toward the place where the wet ground bubbled and churned. "But I can do."

"You're certain?" Wilson frowned down at his device, doubtful. It was a box strapped to a stick, and from inside there was insistent, high-pitched beeping. He held it back the way they'd come, and the beeping ramped down in intensity. "Perhaps we could circle around from the north. It may yet prove to be connected to another land mass."

"Little man," said Wolfgang, and shouldered his spear. "Is no problem. Just wait. You see." Then he stepped into the swamp, with no more preamble than that.

"We'll be fine," said Willow.

"Wait," said Wilson, "You're going, too?"

But Willow was already wading into marshier ground, hiking her skirt up in one hand, lighter clutched tight in the other.

She couldn't have asked for a better arrangement. The reeds were clustered together like hair at the end of a paint brush, each clump overlapping the next. Beyond them, almost on top of them, the glistening, bulbous mass of three monumental spiders' nests promised a different kind of challenge.

Willow's hand was shaking as she thumbed the lighter to life, but it was all adrenaline – pure excitement.

The reeds caught as easily as her mother's silk scarf once had. Flame licked up the hollow stalks and swallowed them, the wind spurring it on. The fire was glorious, a rippling wave of summer hues, a creature of beauty and strength.

Willow licked her lips and watched it go. Her heart was pounding hard and fast, and she was almost dizzy with delight.

She could have stayed right there and watched it all day – but there was work to do.

Willow stepped forward into the patch of reeds, where the flames burned hottest. From the edge of the swamp, Wilson was calling something, distraught and high-pitched, but she paid him no mind. She was moving already, out among the fire, out where the seething ground erupted with sickly purple tentacles that writhed and stretched toward her.

They caught only fire.

The glorious glow that scarcely seemed to touch her seared the skin from them, charred them black and blistered. She lifted her hands above her head and laughed, for now the reeds had lit the spiders' nests as well, and the inhabitants were emerging from within to escape, finding smoke and flame. The hair on their bodies caught – they scrambled from the blaze – but for every one that made it far enough, two fell before they could, legs crackling like kindling.

She could hear Wolfgang, as though from a great distance – knew as a disconnected point of interest that he was still playing his part. His spear cut through what remained of the swamp creatures like a scythe taking down wheat, but she was too busy for that, captivated instead by the remnants of the fire.

She must have been captivated for quite some time, for when she became aware again, the spiders' nests were gone, and so was the patch of reeds. The ground did not pulse underfoot, and all that was left of her magnificent inferno was a flicker of embers, orange and black, on the damp ground.

It was late afternoon, now. Wolfgang, a wooden box tucked beneath his arm, was walking back her way.

"You are hurt?" he asked.

Willow shook her head, feeling as though she were caught in a dream. "I'm very well indeed."

Back at the edge of the swamp, Wilson was gaping as though they'd just performed an elaborate stage show and he was too stunned to yet begin applauding.

"We got," said Wolfgang, and he pressed the box into Wilson's arms.

He looked down at it, and then up at them, and his smile was frankly admiring. "You know," he said. "I do believe the pair of you would have tracked him down without me."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for sticking with this silly series. I'm glad you folks are enjoying yourselves. ^^
> 
> I'm thinking one or two more chapters in this fic, and then (hopefully) another fic in which the two groups meet up.

Wolfgang the mighty, who called the massive hounds of this world puppies and took down the lumbering beasts of the plains with an axe and a smile, was afraid of the dark. As soon as the sun set, his courage evaporated, leaving behind childish, frightened eyes that peered into the darkness as though expecting the monster out there to walk into the light cast by their campfire.

He slept most nights, and Willow had grown used to tending the fire, the hours from sundown till sunup filled with the juddery saw-sound of his snores.

But now the night held a new sound, for in the darker hours Wilson tinkered, and while he tinkered, he talked.

"No," he said to the little fiddly bits as he screwed them into place, "that won't do at all." Or, "Well, you're going to have to stay put, whether you want to or not." Or even, "I've told you a thousand times, it is absolutely imperative that – ah, there you go. See? Was that so hard?"

Some nights he even sang to himself, absently, as though he'd forgotten there was anyone around to hear. His voice was soft and a bit scratchy, surprisingly melodic, and he would get through a whole chorus and half of a verse before breaking off to chastise himself. "A 45 degree angle? What was I thinking?"

Some nights, when the chatter was particularly lively, Willow turned from the fire to watch him instead. With his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth in concentration, he was almost as captivating as the fingers of orange flame.

===

They tracked the next piece to a hoary old pine forest in the middle of a spring storm, dripping wet despite rain hats and jackets. Water sluiced down from the sky like someone stood above them emptying buckets, and no sooner had they arrived than thunder shook the earth, drowning out the beeping of Wilson's gadget.

Willow had just finished thinking that it was a shame nothing would burn in all this wet when lightning forked down in a pillar of white fire. The tree it struck caught instantly, and then the one beside it. Half the forest went, and they stood there watching, dripping, as the blaze spread. Willow stood a little closer than the others, relishing the warmth as it baked at her face – and when the flames died down and there was nothing left but ash and embers, they walked among the charcoal to retrieve a peculiar lump of metal from the burned-out husk of what might once have been a farm.

It was still raining when they made it back to camp, and Willow strung a beefalo pelt between trees to form a shelter. That night, the three of them clustered beneath it and the staccato _tap_ , _tap_ , _tap_ of the water on the roof seemed almost cheerful, somehow.

Wilson talked long and enthusiastically about the tiny gears in the contraption they'd retrieved. "I pulled it apart in the world before this one," he said. "By God, I've never seen such precision workmanship. It was like – like a tiny clock smith made all the gears for a clock no bigger than my thumbnail."

While he showed Willow the seams where he'd pried its predecessor apart, Wolfgang roasted the gobbler that had been too slow to escape the forest fire. It had been partially charred in the flames, and now they finished the job, roasting it until the skin crackled and ran with juice.

They ate it with a handful of berries, and it seemed to Willow that it was the grandest meal she'd had in quite some time.

It tasted a little like victory.

===

Wilson's beard was more than a hand's-width now, straggling and unruly. It grew at an alarming rate, longer and more wild each day. He acted as though the use of a razor had never crossed his mind, though of course it must have.

The sight was impossible to escape: every morning, Wolfgang sat on a log beside the science machine to shave meticulously around his mustache. Then he rinsed the razor, slicked his remaining facial hair with water, and put the blade away in one of their chests.

It was a ritual, as steady and unchanging in Willow's world as the big man's snores had become at night. But today, when he was finished, he broke with routine. Today, he passed the razor to Wilson.

"Will be summer soon," said Wolfgang. "You will not be wanting beard."

"Ah," said Wilson, and left off prodding at his newest gadget for long enough to take the razor. "I suppose not."

So Willow watched with interest as he scraped away the black mess from his chin – watched as a narrow, sophisticated face appeared. Perhaps there was something about the way the fire light caught the angles of it, all warm glow and shadow, but Willow thought that it was a very good face indeed.

"You look better without it," she remarked, when he was finished.

From that day forward, Wilson shaved every morning, too.

===

The ring lay out on the wide-open plain, amid a cluster of dingy and foul-smelling flowers. The crank had been placed in the garden of a pig man, as though for decoration.

Their camp sprouted a thermometer as tall as Willow, and a rod to attract the lightning. The nights were warmer now, and they built a pit of blue fire, every bit as pretty as the usual yellow and orange.

When the hounds came one evening, howls filling the night with a sound that still dripped ice down Willow's spine, she told herself that she was not afraid. That terror was from another time – another her. A world before this one, if Wilson could be believed.

They led the beasts a merry chase through a field of hornets' nests, and when they were finished the hounds were lumps of hairy flesh swollen with hornet venom. Willow's arms to the elbows were all over with red welts, but those dumb dogs hadn't bitten even one of them. Not even one.

She stood over the bodies, grinning, flicking nervously at her lighter. Her thoughts were far away – back, and back, and back – in the world before.

When the fur caught fire, she couldn't recall having made a conscious decision to light it. "Oops," she said, and laughed.

===

Wolfgang slept beside the flickering blue flame, curled up on one side. His mouth was open slightly, and the snores kept pace with the motion of his chest, steady as a ticking clock.

Beside the alchemy engine, Wilson fussed and tinkered. "Blast it," he said, half to himself. "I need another set of hands."

When Willow appeared beside him, he started as though he'd quite forgotten she was there.

"It just so happens, Mr. Higgsbury," she said, "that I have another set of hands."

The work went much faster with the both of them.


End file.
